But the real question of inspiration by love goes deeper and is connected with Aristotle's further suggestion that poetry involves "a strain of madness," a statement which we are wont to interpret as meaning that the poet is led by his passions rather than by his reason. This constitutes the gist of the whole dispute between the romanticist and the classicist, and our poets are such ardent devotees of love as their muse, simply because, in spite of other short-lived fads, the temper of the last century has remained predominantly romantic. It is obvious that the idea of love as a distraction and a curse is the offspring of classicism. If poetry is the work of the reason, then equilibrium of soul, which is so sorely upset by passionate love, is doubtless very necessary. But the romanticist represents the poet, not as one drawing upon the resources within his mind, but as the vessel filled from without. His afflatus comes upon him and departs, without his control or understanding. Poetical inspiration, to such a temperament, naturally assumes the shape of passion. Bryant's expression of this point of view is so typical of the general attitude as to seem merely commonplace. He tells us, in The Poet,
No smooth array of phrase,
Artfully sought and ordered though it be,
Which the cold rhymer lays
Upon his page languid industry
Can wake the listless pulse to livelier speed.
* * * * *
The secret wouldst thou know
To touch the heart or fire the blood at will?
Let thine own eyes o'erflow;
Let thy lips quiver with the passionate thrill.
Seize the great thought, ere yet its power be past,
And bind, in words, the fleet emotion fast.
Coleridge's comprehension of this fact led him to cry, "Love is the vital air of my genius." [Footnote: Letter to his wife, March 12, 1799.]
All this, considering the usual subject-matter of poetry, is perhaps only saying that the poet must be sincere. The mathematician is most sincere when he uses his intellect exclusively, but a reasoned portrayal of passion is bound to falsify, for it leads one insensibly either to understate, or to burlesque, or to indulge in a psychopathic analysis of emotion. [Footnote: Of the latter type of poetry a good example is Edgar Lee Masters' Monsieur D—— and the Psycho-Analyst.]
Accordingly, our poets have not been slow to remind us of their passionate temperaments. Landor, perhaps, may oblige us to dip into his biography in order to verify our thesis that the poet is invariably passionate, but in many cases this state of things is reversed, the poet being wont to assure us that the conventional incidents of his life afford no gauge of the ardors within his soul. Thus Wordsworth solemnly assures us,
Had I been a writer of love poetry, it would have been natural to me to write with a degree of warmth which could hardly have been approved by my principles, and which might have been undesirable for the reader. [Footnote: See Arthur Symons, The Romantic Movement, p. 92 (from Myers, Life of Wordsworth).]
Such boasting is equally characteristic of our staid American poets, who shrink from the imputation that their orderly lives are the result of temperamental incapacity for unrestraint. [Footnote: Thus Whittier, in My Namesake, says of himself,
Few guessed beneath his aspect grave
What passions strove in chains.
Also Bayard Taylor retorts to those who taunt him with lack of passion,
But you are blind, and to the blind
The touch of ice and fire is one.